Related through marriage (on his
maternal side) to Enoch Wood, and so grew up with an intimate knowledge of the
Potteries and Collieries. He was particularly active in the 1960's.

Cedric Price's proposal was to take the whole rusting and decaying industrial
infrastructure of the Potteries, and turn it into a kind of High-Tech
think-tank. It was to be a new kind of university, called the Potteries
Thinkbelt. It was not a "building", but a kind of circuit, or
network, with mobile classrooms and laboratories using the existing rail lines
to move from place to place, from housing to library to factory to computer
center.

It formed an enormous triangle from
Pitts Hill to Madeley to Meir, encompassing all the towns inside, including
Stoke. He also planned a tie-in to the University at Keele.

Existing
factories would be used for study, while new factories could be built to exploit
new discoveries and theories. This, of course, was right in the midst of
the Brain Drain, and Price's idea was to break down the wall between
"pure" and "applied" science and technology, lure the
scientists back to Britain, and put England at the forefront of advanced
technologies. He planned to put the Potteries at the cutting edge of
computer technology. All this in 1965!

Price worked the scheme out quite
carefully, and it might well have worked. The Ministry of Education
politely accepted his proposal and promised to consider it .....nothing ever
came of it.